Cybermourning : reclaiming ritual and negotiating care for the dead online

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Master’s Thesis for Cultural and Social Anthropology at the Graduate School of Social Sciences

Cybermourning:

Reclaiming Ritual and Negotiating Care for the

Dead Online

(Still from ‘Cut Copy Me‘ music video by Petula Clark)

Solveiga Zibaite

10157344

Word count: 24999

Supervisor: prof. dr. Robert Pool

Second readers: dr. Alex Strating and prof. dr. Jeannette Pols Amsterdam. November 23, 2016

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Declaration on Plagiarism and Fraud

I have read and understood the University of Amsterdam plagiarism policy by reading the regulations Governing Fraud and Plagiarism for UvA Students. I declare that this assignment is entirely my own work, all sources have been properly acknowledged, and that I have not previously submitted this work, or any variation of it, for assessment in any other paper.

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Acknowledgments

I wish to express gratitude to my thesis supervisor, Robert Pool for his guidance, continuous motivation and patience with my incoherent ramblings during our meetings.

I am indebted to all of the cybermourners whose stories I‘ve read and especially to those whose journeys I follow in this thesis. They have inspired and grounded me, even if they

might never know that.

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Abstract

The practice of online memorialisation and academic interest in cybermourning has been flourishing in the past two decades. This thesis contributes to the many interdisciplinary studies on online memorialisation by examining the extent to which cybermourning is consistent with pre-digital memorialisation and commemoration practices and which aspects of cybermourning are stemming directly from unique affordances of cyberspace. This goal is achieved by examining the key features of online memorial message content and discourse, as well as tracing the contours of cybermourning as a process. I follow three poignant cybermourning journeys from the start of participation towards its uncertain conclusion. This temporal aspect of inquiry allows to consider the ethical challenges that this practice presents the bereaved with in terms of striving for care for the deceased as the memorial becomes less frequented. I locate the largest influence of extensive technological affordances of internet and cyberspace on cybermourning precisely in this negotiation of separation. The practice of cybermourning presents the bereaved with previously unseen possibilities to highly personalise, continuously edit and deeply interact with the memory of the deceased within a public sphere. It also reconfigures the notion of community based on geographical proximity. Nevertheless, in some of the features of cybermourning, such as enabling cohabitation of living and the dead through technological advances, and in continuities from material engagements with death and memorialisation (physical memorials and keepsakes expanded to digital forms) we can locate some characteristics from previous historical death mentalities. Building on the contemporary virtue of documentation of life, I argue practice of online mourning is a reintroduction of post-mortem ritual into private sphere in secular Western society which otherwise does not readily provide the bereaved with socially prescribed mourning regulations, leaving some of them to turn to this vernacular and democratic construction of memory in cyberspace.

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trance, the mundane flow of navigating through online memorials has now been disrupted by this moment of awareness of readership that the widow, introduced in the second part of the thesis, experienced. I can feel my face getting red as I‘ve been called out by her rage crystalised in words typed over three years ago. She does not refer to me, yet she does – even though susceptible to a server shutdown, the supposed immunity to the decay of words in online universe is able to elicit a reaction in every reader, no matter how much time has passed. Yet, nothing happens. I am still anonymous to the widow, she won‘t know I am reading her correspondence with her husband. This particular widow is currently living on borrowed time and her husband’s memorial will remain unedited for the rest of its existence as she was its sole contributor besides rare messages from her sons. I ask myself: am I a nosy feck? This is not the epithet I desire to be called, but in this case, I am indeed one of the gang of shadows, lurking in the background, registering only as additional profile views. She won’t know how long I’ve spent meditating upon her fear of driving a car alone for the first time, with her husband’s picture in the seat next to her, she won’t know that I know the sweet nickname she used to call him when they were young. Not because she is dying but because I barely leave a mark. Like a fly stuck on the wall with an aching back and a numb behind I am reading her grief as she tells it herself, just as I did in hundreds of other memorials. I am tracking her cybermourning journey, noting whether it is at the hope of dawn or in the comfort of midnight she and the others are compelled to pour their hearts in the flickering blue of the computer screen. Reading this pain I feel detached as a researcher and too intimate as a human being. My biggest hope is that I can connect these two conflicting parts into an empathetic and compelling read that does not undervalue experience and strength of the bereaved. This reading of grief and mourning online has enabled me to accomplish the ambitious goal of this thesis that I will now turn to introduce - to examine the extent to which cybermourning is consistent with earlier, pre-digital commemoration practices and which aspects of cybermourning are stemming directly from unique affordances of cyberspace.

The practice of cybermourning is largely based and reliant on extensive technological innovations of internet and cyberspace and presents the bereaved with previously unseen possibilities to highly personalise and deeply interact with the memory of the deceased

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within a public sphere. Nevertheless, in this thesis I argue that in some of the features of cybermourning, such as enabling cohabitation of living and the dead through technological advances, and in continuities of material engagements with death and memorialisation (physical memorials and keepsakes expanded to digital forms) we can locate several characteristics from earlier historical death mentalities and practices. It also reconfigures the notion of community, based on geographical proximity, simultaneously partially bringing back the preindustrial modes of public mourning, coupled with tensions between notions of public and private in the cyberspace.

I was hesitant to dedicate space to writing about my experience of conducting this research as, considering the heaviness of their experiences, I felt it to be quite disrespectful to ponder upon how I felt as a researcher. After all, I am extremely lucky to not have experienced loss at this stage in my life and I cannot truly align myself with the experiences of the bereaved – this puts some added pressure to my narratives of personal tragedies to be as honest and empathetic as possible. Also, while I still feel that my own feelings of guilt and intrusion are trivial personally, I will admit that this might be important to consider as internet research is becoming increasingly popular. Guidelines for consent for online data use are blurry. One might say that as ‘send’, ‘publish’, ‘enter’ icon or button is pressed, the content does not entirely belong to a person anymore. Lange (2007) writes about YouTube content being “privately public and publicly private”. This conceptualisation of content within the cyberspace and the tension between these two concepts is fully revealed in online memorials and will echo throughout the entirety of the thesis as while grief is becoming more public with the rise of acknowledgment of para-social and disenfranchised grief i.e. grief that is not socially acknowledged (e.g. secret relationship, former partner, online gaming partner), especially in online sphere, the offline experiences of death and bereavement are still sequestered and problematised. Gustavson (2015) was presented with a nearly identical situation of data use ethics when studying Norwegian and Swedish online memorials. He avoided a sensitive ethical issue by limiting his research to those memorials that do not require a login access and are open to the public. I followed suit and observed a publically available online memorial website. In this thesis, all of the names within the stories were changed, no pictures used to protect the anonymity of the bereaved as much as possible. Taking into mind the relatively easy searchability of the data, the name of the website will also not be disclosed, but it is crucial to state that the users of this website are mostly white British working class people (more females than males) exhibiting popular Christian orientation, their education unable to be determined, except from language (grammar, eloquence) – but all of this can be contested and the possibility of emotional outpouring affecting the typing process

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must be taken into account. Throughout the thesis I utilise Kastenbaum’s (1977) definitions of bereavement, grief and mourning. Bereavement here is the state of having had a loved one die. Grief is the emotional reaction to the loss, including not only emotional reactions, but also physical, cognitive, and behavioural symptoms, alongside some social and spiritual aspects (Corr, Corr, & Nabe, 2006). Lastly, mourning is a behaviour and usually refers to taking part in socially sanctioned, public rituals. In the next few following pages I will attempt to situate my research within the academic literature.

i.1 LITERATURE REVIEW

When referring to death mentalities, I evoke Aries’ historical exploration of changes in the Western attitudes towards mortality through millennia following the early medieval period. He presents these changes as four stages – ‘tamed death’, ‘death of the self’, ‘death of the other’ and ‘forbidden death’, a succinct consideration of each will suffice for the purpose of introduction. During the period of ‘tamed death‘ people dwelled in close proximity to the dead, fully aware of their own impending demise, with dying and mourning being public events where the local community would come to one’s deathbed to give their final farewells. Around eleventh/twelfth centuries, a shift to the period of ‘the death of one‘s own’ occurred, with increasing focus being put towards the individual and the moment of death being when the judgement of life ocurred. By the early eighteenth century, this phase was replaced with “death of the other’ that now shifted to the experience of losing someone loved and to ‘a new intolerance of separation” (Aries 1974:59). He states that this was the time when mourning culture flourished and showing emotions of sadness emerged as a response to death as a greedy enemy. ‘The death of the other’ period corresponds with the romantic period in the West and widely researched Victorian culture of death. Although it was a period of so called celebrations of death, it was also a start of the demise of publicness of death and mourning, a retreat of modern death to the outskirts of life. According to Aries, modern trends of individualism and secularity have diminished our competency to gather a community around those dying and in mourning. Dying is transformed into illness, and an ‘untamed death’ is made invisible or forbidden. It is important to note at this point that Aries’ work will not serve as a direct guideline for my thesis. I will use his insights to analyse how the current climate of grief and mourning, experiences of which I attempt to grasp through the messages posted in online memorials (and also consulting academic literature), alongside with how the practice of

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cybermourning itself might be changing that said climate, both might be seen as intermingling features of several death mentalities. Admittedly I found more adherence to some mentalities and practices than others, especially with Victorian death attitudes (around the time of ‘death of the other’ period). It is most possibly due to the fact that I am approaching my analysis from a standpoint of technological influences of grief and mourning, which had truly begun to take its shape with the advent of photography. Lutz (2015) writing on changes following Victorian period, noted that dematerialisation and disembodiment of death mementos occurred partially because of changes in technology. Walter (2015a) outlines how the presence of the dead within a society depends in part on available communication technologies, specifically speech, stone, sculpture, writing, printing, photography and phonography (including mass media), and most recently the internet. In the same vein, new communication and archiving technologies introduced new ways that the dead can ‘haunt’ the living – through photos, sound recordings, motion pictures. Kittler (1999:13) suggests, that “the realm of the dead is as extensive as the storage and transmission capabilities of a given culture”.

A note on traditional personal memorialisation and commemoration practices is necessary. Cann (2014:16) writes that memorials function as replacements for the body since it cannot be kept among the living and they must be reinscribed in public space, in material remembrance. Hallam and Hockey‘s (2001) historical analysis of physical memorials in the West can be summarised as follows. Before the eleventh century in England, memorials were only erected for the wealthy. Partly based on the religious obligation to make wills (Aries 1983), graves of the ‘ordinary’ stated to be marked around that time. Three centuries later, memorials usually contained name, date of death, praise, profession, rank and status. By the fifteenth century inscriptions revealed familial relations and around the seventeenth century started serving as biographic statements and recordings of life’s accomplishments. Newspaper obituaries became prominent in the nineteenth century, importance of photograph as a memory technique will be considered in detail later. The massive losses of two World Wars prompted more significant focus on public, official, carefully planned forms of expression than on intricate personal memorialisation. In the years after World War II, vernacular memorials, broadening the memory work of memorialisation, became more prevalent (Shanken, 2002). Ghost bikes, memorial tattoos, roadside memorials are several examples of these vernacular forms of memorialisation.

Over the last two decades, increasing number of authors from different disciplines engage with the newly emergent trend of digital memorialisation (Roberts and Vidal 2000, de

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Vries & Rutherford 2004, Carroll and Landry 2010, Brubaker & Hayes 2011, Haverinen 2014, Brubaker, Hayes, and Dourish 2013, Giaxoglou 2014 to name a few), but they are largely focused on descriptive analysis of online memorials as newly emergent grief outlets (Brennan, 2008; Hanusch, 2010). Among the few who show interest in continuities between commemorative practices, most significant are Brubaker and Hayes (2011), who find that online memorialisation melds existing post-mortem practices and communication with new technologies to share memories and maintain connections with the deceased, and Giaxoglou, who writes that “web 2.0 mourning is found to be a largely reconfigured, rather than an entirely new form of mourning practice, which relies on sharing user-generated content produced in an ad hoc blending of formal and vernacular genres” (2014:25). Focusing on rhetorics, Hess (2007:813) argues that online memorialisation is a “unique form of communal and vernacular discourse”.

While online memorialisation can be considered an innovative way to communicate grief and go through mourning, the motivations and desires of the bereaved are deeply rooted in the universal existential quest for meaning and in ritual practice. Romanoff & Tenezio (1998) notice that traditional mourning rituals nowadays are often minimised or altogether avoided, while post-funeral rituals as time passes are even rarer. Following Ramshaw (2010:172) we see a cultural postmodern shift in focus from the community to focusing on the individuality of the deceased person in mourning rituals. Winkel (2011) writes that as there occurs a break in the value of the communal ritual in the society, the traditional rituals do not engender meaning in people ‘personally’ so these rituals actually do not benefit the person in any way – it needs to speak to the personal aspect. The rituals are also becoming less formal. Vale-Taylor (2009) sees the importance of informal rituals in that they occur and serve to sustain people in the context of their daily lives. The practice of online mourning is a reintroduction of post-mortem ritual into the public sphere in Western secular society which otherwise does not provide the bereaved with socially prescribed mourning regulations, leaving some of them to turn to vernacular and democratic construction of memory in cyberspace. This conclusion is reached by highlighting the key features of online memorial message content and discourse. I follow three cybermourning journeys in order to trace the contours of cybermourning as a process, investigate the points of starting participation and withdrawing from it. This temporal aspect of inquiry also allows to consider the challenges that this particular practice presents the bereaved with in terms of striving for care for the deceased as they negotiate the appropriate departure from their online memorial presence. I conceptualise care in online memorials as interest in perceived well-being of the deceased (both in a non-rhetorical existence based on afterlife beliefs and in the memorial as a

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surrogate for the person) by showing affection and attention, continuous engagement and considering how one can best withdraw participation. Interactions with the representation of the deceased and the conclusions of online memorial use will be examined by evoking Derrida’s ethical reinterpretation of mourning. In order to more clearly illustrate the progression of cybermourning discourse, I include dates and posting times after each message. Examples from other memorials are not dated. The message language is not edited.

My research aims to fill the gap in literature concerning a more extensive analysis of the lifespan of and discourse developments within online memorials, attempting to locate possible resolutions of mourning and points of disruption. Finding continuities, reversals and ubiquitous computing induced novel impulses in mourning is another addition to existing literature. Discussing possible problems in providing care for the deceased in online memorials during participation and negotiating the decision to withdraw from it, i.e. ethics of cybermourning, is my last contribution.

i.2 NOTES ON METHODOLOGY

The approach I adopt has assumed various different formulations in academic literature, e.g. Hine’s (2000) ‘virtual ethnography’, Androutsopoulos’s (2008) ‘discourse-centred online ethnography’, Robinson & Schulz’s (2009) ‘cyberethnography’, formulations like ‘ethnography of virtual spaces’ (Burrel 2009), ‘netnography’ (Kozinets 2009), etc. Lacking strict guidelines, I arrive at ‘cyberethnography’ as the formulation of my research approach, which is ‘the writing of the culture(s) of the computer-mediated, tele-sociality of the physically disconnected ‘(Churchill, 2015:1) and is fully applicable to cybermouners. In my conceptualisation, cybermourners can be considered a community only in the sense that online shoppers on the same website can. I would refer to this phenomena as a culture, because here, people, affected by similar experiences gather in a dedicated space to engage in a particular behaviour – writing tributes, sharing images, both for the purpose of memorialisation and further consumption by the authors and other visitors. They follow similar textual conventions, personalise the same default memorial – they engage in a cultural practice not bound by a community in a conventional sense. Attempts to produce a community are definitely seen in many instances, but the first impulse to create an online memorial remains to memorialise the deceased; other practices, establishing connections occur or do not occur depending on the

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mourners’ needs. I am more focused on individual mourning journeys (and of similarly invested family members in the same memorial) as online communities of the bereaved and interactions in online support forums have been studied extensively (e.g. Capitulo (2004), Carroll and Landry (2010), Hard af Segerstad & Kasperowski, (2014), Paulus and Varga (2015)). Professional literature on grief and bereavement was consulted in order to deepen my own understanding and to support the observed discursive practices (e.g. Neimeyer (2000), Stroebe and Schutt (1999), Worden (2009), Kübler-Ross &Kessler (2005).

Hine (2000) discusses production of authority in ethnographic accounts (travel to a field site, experience of the field site and sustained interaction with respondents) in terms of online ethnography. Most importantly here, the absence of physical travel to the field is replaced by ‘experiential displacement’, where the researcher experiences a form of travel through computer-mediated environment and becomes acquainted with the values of the space in question (Hine, 2000:45). In legitimising the data produced during an exclusively online research, I follow Garcia et. al. (2009) who state that if in some types of groups, participants’ only contact with each other is via computer-mediated communication, ethnographers can study the social life of these cultures solely by examining their online behaviour. While in the first chapter I follow one family’s cybermourning journey after the same loss, meaning that they are close offline, I do so while taking cybermourning to be one part of mourning process and because it takes place exclusively online, I am able to draw credible conclusions on the features and process of cybermourning itself.

At the start of the research, in order to examine general grief expressions and commemorative strategies in online memorials I observed, recorded, noted reoccurring motives and took inspiration from computer-mediated discourse analysis – a set of methods embedded in linguistic discourse analysis (Herring, 2001, 2004), which nevertheless remained largely qualitative and interpretative. As discourse analysis uses language as a lens for understanding human interaction, this approach aided in identifying the discursive practices and their linguistic manifestation so that it would become possible to capture the essence of narrativised grief. Additionally, Lindlof and Taylor (2002) suggest that textual analysis of public texts, such as blogs, allows researchers to examine ongoing discursive phenomena; this emphasis on individuals’ voice maintains the authenticity of the study. Rosenblatt’s (1983) monograph exhibits an attempt of grief theory building through textual analysis of 56 nineteenth-century U.S. and Canadian diaries. This inquiry into personal documents provides data that is ‘uncontaminated by a framework imposed by the researcher’ (1983:5), thus enabling the researcher to examine the perspective of the diarist.

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Sole focus on written discourse enabled me to trace the general contours of cybermourning journey in terms of discourse at the start, progression and possible conclusion of participation in online memorials. The need for this has been touched upon by Giaxoglou (2015) who addressed the gap in attention to the uses of narrative in social network sites by providing an analysis of entextualised moments of mourning on Facebook. DeGroot and Carmack (2013), conducted a textual analysis of Amy Ambrusko’s personal blog in which she communicates her experience of parental grief in three ways: (a) (re)questioning reality, (b) experiencing discursive and corporeal guilt, and (c) rationalising a ‘new normal’ (2013:456) – they do not explicitly accentuate the temporal aspect of changes in her online grief discourse as they follow her journey. Differently, my research focuses on the traceable aspects of cybermourning which can uncover the limits and affordances, uniqueness and familiarity of the activity itself, instead of outlining how computer mediated communication aids in grief sharing and coping. Nevertheless, the authors’ rhetorical-critical approach to qualitative textual analysis is essentially what I adopted in the second half of my research where I focused on selected case studies. I examined specific cases in-depth as exemplars (with awareness that each case is individual but will exhibit some patterns visible in other cases), in order to understand their uniqueness as well as to provide insight into a specific phenomenon or rethink a theoretical approach (Stake, 2000). In the body of the thesis I will present three main stories through which the reader will become familiar with some of the ways online memorial can be utilised.

The thesis is divided into four chapters. I start chapter 1, ‘Embarking on a cybermourning journey’, by discussing how people create or come upon online memorials and how they start participating. In the second part of chapter 1 “‘rip romio n juliet together foreva xxxxx’: dealing with family tragedy”, I focus one family’s cybermourning journey after death of a young couple here named Layla and Keith. This story will give us an insight into the offline situations the bereaved are presented with (pressure to maintain composure in social situations, follow the ‘normal’ progression of grief, seek professional counselling) that drive them to participate in Layla’s cybermemorial to continue their communication with her and foster the couple’s shared memory as Romeo and Juliet, supported by attention from other visitors. This story guides us to a discussion on the expansion of keepsakes of the dead (from physical keepsakes to digital legacy) and later consideration on ethics of continuous care for the deceased online. In chapter 2, ‘Ongoing mourning of two widows’ I present two stories of very different expressions of grief and dealing with mourning, as well as using online memorials for different purposes. In the first part, “‘Withering away without your touch’: grief that requires physical intimacy”, I present an ongoing cybermourning journey of a widow in whose grief we can

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recognise certain aspects of deep, even erotic yearning of physical intermingling with the deceased, becoming one not in spirit, but in death, similar to some of Victorian mourning mentalities. I also discuss the neglected meaning that sorrow after bereavement grants survivors with and how it is unnecessarily treated as pathological. In the second part of Chapter 2, “‘If only I could dance with you, especially on my birthday’: disrupted mourning of a happy widow’”, I discuss how the use of an online memorial can be continued, transformed under certain circumstances even as the mourning is reaching conclusion (as expressed by the widow herself). In the story I also locate the importance and virtue of memory in contemporary Western society and how forms of memory, facilitated by technology can inform us about the ability of online memorials to evoke the same cohabitation between living and the dead as spirit photography and spiritualism séance did. In Chapter 3 ‘Language, spirituality and community in online memorials: key features of engagement’, I present important features of the three modes of engagement that are central to online memorials. I focus on how language is affected by computer mediation, differences in discourse based on familial relations, expressions of spirituality, attempts to situate the dead in a certain afterlife, and return to the contested term of cybermourners as community. In the final chapter ‘Accommodating loss/Withdrawing care: Ethics of cybermourning’ I approach the question of possible resolution of cybermourning and consider the challenges this form of memorialisation presents the bereaved who strive for continuous care for the dead. I utilise Derrida’s ethics of mourning for this task and Frankel’s and Hartman’s psychoanalytical conceptualisations of cybermourning.

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10 Chapter 1. EMBARKING ON A CYBERMOURNING JOURNEY

One starts a cybermourning journey by creating or writing in a dedicated personal online memorial on a dedicated website (this is the case in my research – Facebook memorials are also prevalent, but I will remark on how they are different in due course) and before discussing the trends of creation and start of participation, I shall briefly remark on the ways online memorials are consistent with physical grave markings. It is important to note that I hold cybermourning to be a supplement to mourning and memorialisation, expanding, instead of replacing traditional forms of these practices. Markings of the final resting place of the body (where applicable) are still primary evokers of memory due to their proximity to the remnants. I consider cybermourning to be an expansion of these surrogates for the deceased, as one is attempted to locate within that context as well. Online memorials bear markings of birth and death, just as traditional grave markings, however most often they are more expansive and display an array of photos and music. It is usual that clicking a poster’s profile one can see the familial or friendship relation to the deceased. The mourners here identify themselves and in some cases there are several memorials linked based on the relations of the deceased. Open displays of kinship are a part of traditional memorialisation.

The following analysis of trends comes from a sample of 40 memorials from each year since 2005 (website’s establishment) to 2016, a total of 480 memorials. The age of people for whom the memorial is created varies immensely with people over 50 making up a larger part. Slightly more memorials are dedicated for males than females. Throughout the past decade, this activity has evolved from being a novelty, an additional way to memorialise those departed long ago, to a more immediate reaction to death, a convenient and legitimate form of memorialisation. From approximately 2009 there is a surge of memorials created on the day of the death or several days later, which demonstrates that online memorials become a way to connect with the deceased before the funeral. This trend of providing the deceased with an online memorial in under a week after death still holds strong today and some might even exhibit an urgency to do so as a show of care for the dead: How sad that only 9 months later James had a site of his own... According to the poster, who remarks on a death in 2007, this is an unfortunately long time for someone to be without a memorial. Online memorials thus are created consciously post-death, categorises as intentional as opposed to unintentional forms of memorialisation (Haverinen, 2014). They do not bear physical proximity to the final resting place of the body, neither are they the digital remnants of the person, like a Facebook memorial, or what Philips calls a snapshot of the user’s life just before their death (2011), is. Online memorials are brought into existence by the bereaved who

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wish for a dedicated space (the safety of this space is contested and will be discussed later) for solace. This brings into question the essential feature of online memorials that makes them unique – their democratisation of remembrance and grief that enables users to engage in mourning in their own pace, with easily customisable features and dedicated personal territory.

Another important aspect is the relation of the memorial creator to the deceased. They are overwhelmingly mothers, sisters, daughters, nieces – female family members. This replicates Roberts and Vidal’s (2000) and de Vries and Rutherford’s (2004) findings that women authored more online memorials. De Vries and Rutherford concluded that the patterns of cybermourning are just one more manifestation of a gendered society. On the other hand, Musambira et.al (2006-2007), studying message content among bereaved parents in the memorials of their children, found that gendered bereavement communication styles diminish in cyberspace. Gendered grief expressions might be more prevalent in specialised websites (e.g. for AIDS victims, miscarriage grief etc.). My researched website is not a specialised website and the fact that the longer cybermourning journeys I presented here are of females, might support the argument that females in online memorials are more inclined to express emotions of grief and continue to be invested in this bond with the deceased for a longer period of time than males, as I was not successful in locating male cybermourning journeys of similar scope.

From around 2010, there is a growing trend of friends creating memorials and participating in them regularly, which attests to the rise of pervasive social media culture, where friend circle expands vastly and friends feel legitimised to create online memorials whereas earlier it was more of a family affair. There are different ways people come to participate in already created online memorials. Most frequently mourners are family members and close friends for whom creating an online memorial means finding a meaningful avenue to memorialise and remember their loved ones. People who create accounts after finding out about a particular death from media outlets make up a significantly smaller portion of mourners. These people offer their condolences, most often clearly stating where they found out about the death from. DeGroot (2009) terms online voyeurs who visit Facebook memorials of strangers or distant acquaintances to read what others write and to post their own messages as emotional rubberneckers. I will continue to use the term passerby as I encountered this self-conceptualisation on several occasions within the website. They don’t have any personal connection to the deceased and their families, most often they visit memorials of people whose deaths have been shared online or televised. Generally, in order to gain media attention these deaths tend to be more unusual or tragic in nature. This type of person is quite different from members of ‘online family’, who show support by posting on memorials of people who have suffered the same destiny as their loved ones.

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‘Online family’ members share their stories alongside with offering condolences, often stressing the similarity of their experiences as a thread that should connect the hearts of the afflicted – this is indeed a form of community.

Posts from passersby are most often simply RIP, sleep tight, often the lack of connection is explicitly acknowledged (I didn‘t know him, but I read your story…). Attention sometimes is welcomed, but that depends on particular situation of the family. There are also people who stumble upon the online memorials of the people they already knew a long time ago after spontaneously googling their names.

I met Jane through playing online games at ___.com. She loved to chat with each game move and I very much enjoyed her friendliness and sense of humor. I miss playing Triple Boatzee with her.

Another poster even remarked that he had no idea that Jane’s death was the reason why she was not returning his emails. Two further examples from another memorial: She was my

penpal years ago and i just googled her name and found this page. Even though i never met her i am relly shocked.I am surprised that the death of an "internet-friend" can make me feel so sad...

I remembered her name for years now because it is the same name as a supermarket when i was young. So i googled it. Maybe i should not have googled it...

The poster’s remorse about having googled his long lost acquaintance shows that he regrets quite unnecessarily inflicting uncomfortable feelings upon himself and that he could have lived in blissful ignorance (which he will probably return to in a few hours at most) is quite narcissistic and enlightens us not only about the incredible reach of internet, but also that online memorials are avenues for expressing disenfranchised grief (internet friends, ex-partners, etc. – relationships usually not socially acknowledged as primary grievers).

In the case of inaugural tributes in personal memorials, they most commonly exhibit a great deal of shock and initial hesitations on how to start formulating the message, especially if it was created very soon after death. The majority of these messages start in a way that makes it easy to imagine the slightly gaping mouth and glazed eyes of a bereaved, stunned by the quickness of death: I am speechless, what can I say…/ I don’t know how to start - this kind of confusion and speechlessness is not usually seen in the inaugural tributes in memorials that have been created after a certain longer time after death, but the sense of shock and disbelief periodically manifests in the posts around birth and death anniversaries through such statements as I can’t believe it’s been six years since you left / it seems like only yesterday we were together’

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After discussing how people (also, what kinds of people) come to participate in online memorials, I will now move on to analyse a particular story that will provide the reader with the first closer look into a cybermourning journey.

1.1. ‘RIP ROMIO N JULIET TOGETHER FOREVA XXXXX’: DEALING WITH FAMILY TRAGEDY

Above is a post from a passerby. In this case the person saw the story I am about to discuss in an online media outlet. Here, a passerby perpetuated the myth presented in the media, he/she might have even be moved to tears and decided to pay their respects in a digitised manner.

Romanticising tragedy, cocooning the familial calamity in an everlasting myth can be a way of making sense, an avenue to construct the events as inevitable for the affected family. Romeo and Juliet was an epithet used in the articles published online about the tragic faith of Layla and Keith. We start the story on 28th_{August 2007 when Keith hanged himself after a row}

he had with Layla, his partner of four years, about their dog being allowed in the bedroom. He was outlived by two daughters from a previous relationship, Layla and her eight-year-old son Jack. I located Keith’s memorial and the messages Layla left for a year after his death, but the main focus will be on Layla’s family’s cybermourning journey, which can be traced to New Year’s Day of January 2014. This story will present the reader with the landscape of problems the bereaved face in terms of controlling their grief expressions in offline contexts, the need to create a meaningful narrative after traumatic bereavement, similarities between digital and physical keepsakes and struggle to provide adequate care for Layla in the online memorial. These discussions aid in conceptualising cybermourning as a reintroduction of post-mortem (vernacular and self-proclaimed therapeutic) ritual in society, otherwise indifferent to the mourner’s condition.

For Layla, writing in Keith’s memorial is not the first thought on her mind to cope with Keith’s death, but she confesses: for some reason i cant stay from this site and writing here i feel asthow

u are [reading] this...mad i know (Dec 27, 2007 12:00 AM).

This compelling urge to write as if the deceased reads is met with some reservations not by Layla alone. It is especially clear when posts are directed to older people to whom social media and computer usage have not become a second nature and their imagined posthumous

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presence in cyberspace, or as posthumous users of internet is questionable. A girl writes to her grandmother:

it is funny but not one of the family realise that you could not use the computor in real life and you could not read unless it was to do your horses,so why would you read this,I think it gives us all comfort to write to you as it feels that your still here.

So, some mourners acknowledge the fact that their loved ones are not actually reading their messages as they would not be able to access the words that are supposed to reach them in the same medium due to their lack of digital literacy. However, I found that some mourners at least to some extent (as consolation or a metaphor) assume that afterlife has a similar cultural logic and constitution as the world of the living. Consider this gift left by a friend:

Indeed, for some posters the ability to communicate with the dead is not a rhetoric, as evident from a number of studies (Kern et al. 2013: 66; Kasket 2012; Staley 2014), though the precise logistics remain a mystery. Here we even find a communication attempt to bargain in the face of ominous presence:

Hi Dad, its been 10 weeks since we lost you. We miss and love you very much Dad but you need to stop hurting (daughter). What you are doing to her is cruel and uncalled for Dad. We hope that you finally do find the peace you've been for but first you need to [stop] hurting [daughter] PLEASE.

While it is not certain if Layla believes in Keith’s afterlife and posthumous awareness, certain are her attempts to locate Keith. But unfortunately his physical presence is eliminated:

i stood at ur grave and u wer not there, i felt nothing all i cud feel was the rain on my face and the warm tears down my cheeks..but i cudnt feel u. (Dec 27, 2007 12:00 AM)1

Here we can feel Layla‘s inner conflict – she desires to be comforted by the sense of Keith’s presence, but she treats her own attempt to write to him with hesitance and disbelief. With the rising popularity of online memorials we are witnessing the increase in discussions upon sensed apparitions of the deceased, most often in passing sensations, breath on the face etc.: I

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knew it was you! You gave me a wee fright but Im so happy! - even if it is exclusive to these safe spaces

online. Ongoing relationship with the dead has been recorded extensively in anthropological literature (Hertz (1960) [1907], Huntington and Metcalf (1979), Danforth (1982), Francis, Kellaher and Neophytou (2000), to name a few), but as mourning was framed within secular and psychological discourses in the twentieth century West, talking to the dead had become increasingly confined to the privacy of their home or alone at the graveside. I argue that the ongoing communication online, addressing the deceased directly in social media (Hastings, Hoover, & Musambira, (2005), Brubaker & Hayes, (2011), DeGroot, (2012)) while being aware of the readership, signals that previously private practice becomes increasingly socially accepted.

As mentioned before, I hold the physical location of the remains to continue to be the primary place for identification with the deceased, but writing in an online memorial provides a more permanent way to communicate than thought or spoken word. A message often is sent soon after grave visitation i.e.: we went to your grave yesterday it looks wonderful or i love going to see u its so

nice just to sit and talk to u wen i need to, i hope u liked ur other letter and poems – one could have

expressed these hopes at the graveside, yet writing and sending the message appears to be an attempt of real life interaction, instead of one being focused in thoughts, especially due to computer mediated communication beings so engrained into everyday forms of communication.

As Layla’s and Keith’s relationship was very turbulent and unofficial, Layla was not acknowledged by Keith‘s family as a rightful mourner and even blatantly blamed for his death. She gradually became more and more reserved in disclosing personal details about her life and emotions, her last message was posted on the first anniversary of Keith‘s death and she claimed to be destroyed by his departure. Two days later she overdosed by Keith‘s grave, was rushed to the hospital, resuscitated and released despite promising to attempt to take her life again and eventually going through with a copycat suicide at home. Layla’s torment and suffering in Keith’s online memorial was reserved, focused on attempted redemption in the eyes of Keith’s family. There was an outpouring of shock and mixed emotions in Layla’s memorial, created two days after her death, in which her mother and sister are main participants:

Mother: Ive been sat here for over 2 hours just staring at this memorial, not knowing what to

write to yoy. Everytime i try i just start crying (Sep 2, 2008 11:56 PM).

Sister: Its wıered because ı am so cut up about thıs but ı am sooo soo sooo happy for you that you

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Following the tragic conclusion of both lives, to be able to see Layla’s death as meaningful, her family and friends praised the re-unification of star-crossed lovers, rendering their love to be worthy of a higher plane, too pure for this world. The family accepted the copycat suicide as Layla’s ultimate sacrifice, the most superior show of love for Keith and it was Layla’s mother who insisted on the Romeo and Juliet epithet to be used in the online article. Neimeyer and Klass (2014) argue that grief (or mourning) is not primarily an interior process, but rather one that is intricately social, as the bereaved commonly seek meaning in this transition in not only personal and familial but also broader community and even cultural spheres. In their social constructionist view, mourning is a situated interpretive and communicative activity charged with establishing the meaning of the deceased's life and death, as well as the posthumous status of the bereaved within the broader community concerned with the loss. The wider public appraisal is indeed extremely important for Layla’s family. After their story was published 10 days after her death, traffic in Layla’s and Keith’s memorials increased significantly. A good example of a generic post by a passerby on Layla‘s memorial:

i read the story in that's life this morning and have been on this page since, i have been reading all the tribute messages and it has all bought me to tiers...such a sad story.

Another example: i hope im not intruding here but i felt compelled to leave a tribute, i realise

its the old gimmick of 'i read your story' thing but it really touched my heart.

This passerby states that his intentions are more honest and he recoils from engaging in this ‘cliché’ activity – yet it appears that the passerby sees some positive aspects of showing care to strangers in this way, or else one wouldn’t bother to comment.

In Layla’s memorial we see how her family members conceptualise their grief and why they write in the memorial. Generally, there is a concern about the normal progression of grief and for Layla’s family it is extremely important to make sense of the overflowing feelings and to make sure that they are following some sort of pattern.

Best friend (female): Im finding things really really difficult at the moment, and im letting it

affect the relationships that mean alot to me. But people just dont understand. I might not show im hurting, I might seem like im coping on the outside.. but Im not :( :( (Mar 24, 2009, 11:08 pm)

Mother: Its 11 months since you left.... i just cant believe it... It only seems like yesterday that

you Keith and Jack were larking around in the back garden. This year has gone so fast, I keep very busy so i dont have to feel :( I love talking about the both of you.. but hate feeling it.. so i dont feel i just carry on as normal. (Jul

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Her mother tries to resume her routines and tries to gather herself in public.

I am just going around doing my normal daily things as though nothing has happened, but i know that it is denial and one day im gonna realise that you have really gone. (Sep 19, 2008 07:19 PM)

Dont wanna cry infront of the others, as dont want to upset them. (Sep 24, 2008 07:08 PM)

Through these words we can peek into the social expectations the mourner faces during his/her tribulations. Moller (cited in Gilbert 2006:259) states that the trivialisation of bereavement and pathologising of mourning curtail public expression of grief-related suffering in order to preserve the public sanctity of a pleasure and entertainment ethos. As Gilbert (ibid: 248) noted, there is a certain mourner‘s shame in the current social climate: “when bereavement is itself nearly as problematic as death, however, it’s no wonder that sufferers feel freest to air their feelings of loss when they’re most alone – at the glimmering computer screen. And it shouldn’t surprise us either if words of consolation are easiest to utter when they‘re articulated in silence, on a keyboard” (ibid: 247). The moments in lone introversion indeed spur the stimulus to write:

Mother: Sat here working late getting a bit of peace and quiet and thinking about you xxx I

keep getting this strange feeling lately.... like im waiting for something... but i dont know what !!??? its very odd. Its something to do with you but i cant quite fathom it out!! Its like i think im going to see you or something.... cant explain it lol xx (Jan 20, 2009 11:58 PM)

Grandmother: Just wanted to come on and have a moan as im feeling a bit down at the moment, don't

feel like talking or listening to anyone just feel like locking myself in a room till i feel more like my old self again.

(Mar 17, 2009 05:53 PM)

Gorer (1965) wrote, applying the observation applicable to all English speaking countries with a protestant tradition, that “death and mourning at present are being treated with the same prudery as sexual impulses were a century ago.” C.S. Lewis (1961), also observed the distaste with which his lover’s sons reacted when he tried to approach the subject of her death. In lieu of Gorer, Elias (1985) commented on embarrassment felt by the living in the presence of dying people and in turn the bereaved due to the lack of appropriate language resources. Bauman (1992) writes that in our secular and science-oriented society the only vocabulary we are trained and allowed to use is the “vocabulary geared to the collective and public denial and concealment of death itself, thus we may offer the dying only a language of survival, a language of therapy, the language of self-help books and second opinions”. It is this optimistic vocabulary that evokes anxieties about fulfilling societal expectations for the bereaved as well.

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Girl writing to older sister who died at the age of 24: Hey beautiful have just found

myself on here, i was telling auntie i don't feel that urge to write as much on here any more, i have finally accepted your gone and that i must carry on and live a life you would be proud of. Writing has been my therapy i guess and it really has helped, the fact that i have stopped doesn't mean i love you or miss you any less but am sure you know that, i don't even know why i am explaining myself yet here i am,

Layla‘s mother: I think writing to you is possibly my therapy for getting my thoughts out of my

head and is a coping mechanism too. (Sep 23, 2009 08:57 PM)

Here we find a remarkable adherence of some online memorial content to grief managing strategy of creating a meaningful narrative (a durable biography, produced, shared and continuously reaffirmed by the mourners as Walter (1996) conceptualises it) to reduce cognitive strain and help make sense of the loss in the event of bereavement (Neimeyer 2000) and I further argue that this is a form of vernacular self-care, a personal ritual in a public sphere, and what is most appealing to cybermourning is that the self-awareness and acceptance of loss can be done at one‘s own pace, without rigid professional guidance.

Layla’s sister: I think im the same as mum. I can only talk about how i really feel on here. We

all talk about you all day everyday. But its not the same as dealing and talking about what happened. (Oct 14, 2008 10:32 PM)

Mother: Ive got the letter about going for counselling, but dont want to ring them because they

may make me realise the truth, and i still dont think im ready for the reality of it all. My emotions change so much during the day its unreal, but i cant show any of them, so i seem fine to everybody, but im not really. I dont know whats going on in my head... maybe this is normal?? I dont really know!!! (Nov 4, 2008 07:18 PM)

Sister: I Need to get mum back to councilling, I no it really helped her just the way she spoke

about it. I Dont think it helps at all, nice to talk about you, I could do it all day everyday, but really really done like it when she talks about how much i miss you, and what we used to do together, our childhood etc etc, Talking about you not being around anymore makes my belly turn and my eyes water, any mention of grieving for you and I just want to cry a river :'( (Apr 6, 2009 03:56 PM)

The hesitation to get professional help or to doubt in its effectiveness can both be seen as a personal fear of inability to cope and a negative aspect of institutionalisation alongside the general climate of death and bereavement. One of the most controversial recent advances in psychiatry that further proved the medicalisation of grief was the removal of the bereavement exclusion in the diagnosis of major depression in DSM-5 (APA, 2013). This means that the person, suffering from psychosomatic symptoms after bereavement will not be excluded from

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being diagnosed as suffering from major depressive disorder, reinforcing the perception that grief is problematic, rather than a natural human reaction to loss. The doctor’s office has taken the place of community rituals and traditions that in the past created space and support for grief and mourning. What has previously been a cultural or religiously prescribed ritual now, in the hands of emerging popular profession of grief counsellor becomes a psychologically prescribed process.

*

Just as pictures on her computer create constant painful reminders for Layla about Keith (everytime i turn on my laptop i see the picture of me and you, everytime i go on msn i see the thing i have

wrote for you.i just feel stuck as thow time is at a standstill), her loved ones consciously choose moments

of her digital presence to be their keepsakes.

Best friend (female): I keep wanting to buy a new phone but don't wanna cos i have all of your

txts, i can't delete them, how sad am i?? lol.. (Oct 20, 2008 12:32 PM)

Sister: I still have the e-mail you sent me 10 days before you died-im never gonna delete it.(Mar 26,

2009 08:26 PM)

As increasingly large parts of our daily life go online or become digitised, digital keepsakes are rapidly becoming secular relics, post-modern personal traces and artefacts with time stamps. Hallam and Hockey (2001) write that sensations of proximity to deceased relatives and friends in contemporary Western societies are often achieved through the written word. It is the materiality of writing that is key in its memory making and locating a remnant of a person through physical traces - shapes and unintelligible marks, a particular swish of a hand holding a pen by the loved ones. What then can be said about emails and text messages? They do not have physical contact with the deceased, all typed text looks the same (unless a person uses a rare unusual font) what they do carry is intellectual contact – a part of the deceased’s intellect is kept in the quick wit of a response to a chat message, an advice to a problem that has been meditated upon and carefully crafted into an email. The intellect can travel through space and time in typed words thus providing the bereaved with a trace of unique thought process, expanding the scope of secular, personal pre-digital relics. However, this is rarely seen in online memorial: Layla’s family are able to read her messages in Keith’s memorial where her words intermingle with theirs thus allowing to find some authenticity.

Following this short discussion on digital texts expanding the notion of post-mortem keepsakes, it is useful to return to the conceptualisation of cybermourning as a

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reintroduction of vernacular, personal post-death ritual in inherently public space in order to see how ritual and discourse come together. Giddens (1991) argued that the decline of formal rituals and knowledge of performative scripts concerning death rituals was partially influenced by the post-modern focus on increasing individualism. Walter (1994) furthers this discussion in stating, that the neo-modernist2_{individual does not seek out ritual in the same manner as previously,}

when the ritual was rooted in the community as a socially approved way to symbolically express emotion at the time of crisis but ritual is replaced by discourse and emotions are expressed by talking, e.g. in therapy of grief groups (1994:177). Based on written discourse, creative personalisation and multimedia uploads, online memorialisation partially satisfies four steps of effective post-death rituals, defined by Kollar (1989), which are 1) entering into a special time or place; 2) engaging in a symbolic core act; 3) allowing time to absorb what has occurred and is occurring; and 4) taking leave. The ability to instantaneously access online memorials, continuously monitor them without physical travel, akin to Kollar’s entering a special place is a defining feature of online memorials that is influencing cybermourning process:

Sister: I might not write much, but i am constantly on this site! Can't keep away.

I brought myself an iPhone, and i keep checking throughout the day when Im not home to see whats going on on

here. (Oct 14, 2008 10:32 PM)

There is a sense of continuous vitality as one keeps refreshing the page and finding a newly posted message or a lit candle (which is a feature that only allows a small number of words of accompaniment – some prefer this form of tribute, others prefer engaging in more detail in message window). Psychoanalyst Hartman states that what makes cyberspace access different from earlier innovations in technology is that the internet is not understood to be a conduit to real interaction, nor as a resource but, as ‘space’ (2012:461). According to Tække (2002:33) it is a space “where we do not only see and listen to broadcast communication, but participate in communication, create things and satisfy needs.” Continuing from this instantaneous satisfaction, Hartman writes that in cybermourning the emphasis is not on reparation to the loss but on transforming the structure of experience. “The vector is not from melancholia to mourning, from holding on to letting go, but from one version of a cherished experience to the next. The object’s vitality relies on its capacity for reuse” (2012:461). Constant re-remembering and re-embedding the dead in online memorials with the use of easily

2_{Walter (1994) writes on the late modern and post-modern revival of death which he conceptualises as} modern. It is also an attempt to revive certain aspects of traditional death, so may also be termed neo-traditional.

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manipulated and constantly shared, forwarded and commented on visual, textual, audio content is capable of transforming the visceral experience of commemoration.

Layla’s family is aware of their denial of loss, fear of dealing with devastation and simultaneously, they feel that the fact that they are blocking thoughts about Layla’s death somehow negate her presence, that wherever she is, she is neglected by the bereaved, as evident from these examples:

Mother: Sorry not wrote for a while.. feel really guilty , almost like im ignoring you... but

sometimes i love coming on here and having a good old moan and a natter and sometimes i just cant face it. (Jan 26, 2009 07:23 PM)

Ive been avoiding this site like the plague for the last few weeks and feeling so darn guilty cus i dont want you to think that im ignoring you, though if there is an afterlife then you will know exactly how ive been feeling lately :-( (Apr 17, 2009 08:13 PM)

Let’s consider some broader literature on features of online memorials to further the discussion. Hutchings writes, that among a variety of other benefits to be gained from online memorialisation (global access, quick erection site, easy storage and editing, etc.), there is a sense that they are also immune to dangers of physical decay (Hutchings 2012:49), which is a point remarked by several other authors (Sherlock (2013), Lagerkvist (2014)), yet while online memorials are indeed non-corrosive, the possibility of instant loss of content in an event of irrevocable server failure calls this concept of durability into question. In addition, I do not see why the features mentioned above are considered benefits. The possibility of interaction and easy instantaneous access to the memorials and posted tributes might hinder the mourning process by continuously opening up the wounds: I haven't been on here for a year and now I am sitting here reading

the messages that I have left you and feeling the pain all over again. It makes the grief pervasive, seeping

from all devices, reminding about the deceased waiting for confirmation of love. The interactive essence of online memorials might heighten senses of guilt and neglect. Especially if one is tempted to look at other memorials and compare. Comparison of the quality of care in memorials based on personal criteria (as there are no formal conventions established), seeing the outpouring of love, many photos, creative banners etc., might truly become a problem for the bereaved. This might be similar to the difference between properly cared for and unkempt resting places in cemeteries. If there is a bouquet of flowers on a grave, there is no way of knowing who and how long ago put them there (unless they’re decaying), but in online memorials, each post is authored and dated, so it is much easier to evaluate participation. This has been touched upon philosopher Stokes (2015), who claims that the dead persist as moral

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patients and their digital remains entrust upon us a moral duty of care. He considers deletion to be akin to second death. Here he is concerned with personal profiles, traces of live person’s activity, while online memorials are spaces that the bereaved created thus are entirely responsible for engraining meaning within it and providing upkeep. Layla’s family are indeed feeling guilt not only for not writing what they deem is often enough, but also in not dealing with their grief through professional channels.

Continuing on Kollar’s aspects of post-death rituals, the second aspect-engaging in a symbolic core act - is presented throughout the thesis as memorialisation, commemoration and communication with the deceased. Concerning the third aspect - allowing time to absorb what has occurred and is occurring, I have remarked that there are no regulations on the pace and amount of time the bereaved are required to orient themselves towards, or indeed, there is no goal at all. Lastly, online memorials do not satisfy the taking leave aspect due to their easy access and continuous engagement – this argument is central to the discussion at the end of the thesis. To summarise, this chapter focused on the start and the first year of Layla’s family’s cybermourning journey. In their messages, I located some expressions on how the bereaved are expected to control their emotions in social situations and deal with grief in ‘appropriate’ pace and channels – this is characteristic to the contemporary context of grief and mourning in Western largely secular societies. Messages are always posted in private settings, either assuming the similar cultural logic of the afterlife or writing with the knowledge that there is no chance the deceased will read the message, as a self-proclaimed therapy. The construction of Romeo & Juliet narrative aids the bereaved family in justifying Layla’s actions and making sense of the tragedy. Her family was proud that the epithet was continuously used by passersby and they welcomed their attention, the public opinion helping to reaffirm narrative of the deceased. This example shows that online memorials are helpful avenues for durable biography (Walter, 1996) and meaning reconstruction (Neimeyer, 2000) frameworks, prominent at the cusp of twenty-first century. Such digital keepsakes like emails and text messages expand the scope of pre-digital strategies of keeping remnants of the dead by incorporating intellectual traces. Cybermemorials themselves, I argue, do not carry the same kind of connection to the deceased and make it hard to interact with the actual memory of the deceased. We also saw that the failure to keep up with the levels of care (which are not established formally in any way) in an online memorial can cause adverse feelings of guilt within the bereaved, similar to the upkeep of physical graves, but much more pervasive and visible. We now leave Layla’s family in the midst of their cybermourning journey - their story and the possibilities of resolution of mourning will be revisited towards the end of the thesis.

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23 Chapter 2. ONGOING MOURNING OF TWO WIDOWS

2.1 ‘WITHERING AWAY WITHOUT TOUCH’: GRIEF THAT REQUIRES PHYSICAL INTIMACY

Searching behaviours are inherent to grief, but in this chapter I will present a story in which we can recognise certain aspects of deep, even erotic yearning of physical intermingling with the deceased, becoming one again not in spirit, but in death, similar to some of the Victorian mourning mentalities. This story will illuminate the limits of cybermourning in providing a relationship of desired level of intimacy. I also note that healing from grief’s depression, presented as an overarching goal for the well-being of the deceased is not always personally required (Klass, 2013).

A large number of both classical and recent sociohistorical studies support the Victorian concern with death rituals (e.g. Curl (1972), Jalland (1996), Pearsall (1999), Lutz (2011), (2015)). The context of obsession with death can be described succinctly as influenced by religious scepticism, convention of social display, advertised by the rising undertaking business, the physical immediacy of death, and romantic literary influences. Mourning in Victorian England was highly regulated, even oppressive, with complex rules on propriety of mourning (Walter (1999), Hallam and Hockey (2001)). Victorian death relics, most commonly jewellery with human hair, teeth, as well as remnants such as a finger bone were personal, secular and private artefacts, most popular during the nineteenth century. Lutz (2011) notes that there are also second-hand, or contact relics - clothing, letters, manuscripts (sweat, blood, tears, carrying the essence of the body), as well as artefacts from porous materials, such as wood. On the one hand, nineteenth-century relic culture seems to shield a person from the finality of death as the material relic might act as a proof of further existence, but on the other hand, the relic only gains its meaning through death, so the fact of death is pondered upon exhaustively. In short, Victorian culture can be said to have facilitated engagement with death and its materiality, the relics provided a connection with the body of a loved one, a sense of continuity, not of life as one knows it, but of the permanence of tangible presence. The relic culture disappeared shortly after the death of Queen Victoria in 1901. What followed was that the death in modern Western society has been hidden, isolated, privatised, bureaucratised, medicalised, hospitalised and ‘dehumanised’ (Prior 1989:15). Jalland (1996:299) notes, that “criticism [of Victorian mourning artefacts] tends to judge surviving artefacts by later twentieth-century standards and assumptions. It neglects the significant role of